This blog is one more tool of Democracy in DiEM25 in the pursuit of a profound democratisation of Diem25. It is open to everyone who is willing to cooperate in the struggle for democracy in Diem25, In Europe and in the world at large.

The question: how to go forward now – Pedro: use the coordinators list, send to JM and/or YV by email, Wessel: ask JM in an email how to contact the CC directly

Philip shared information on the CC workload, apparently some CC members like YV gets 200-1000 mails daily, better to contact Srecko who is likely the most open CC member, also sending an email to JM and using the coordinators list is good

Proposal by Wessel:

1. send an email to JM and ask addresses of the CC: in case of no response

Philipp suggests to change the organization of the questions and rename the section “Grassroots democracy” because it is leading and suggests this is what we want

Distribution of the questionnaire was discussed in the last meeting

The questionnaire is already quite long

Wessel reminds that the text is already in the amendment phase, these amendments need to be agreed on this meeting and then we will put the questionnaire on vote

Pedro reminds that the questionnaire is not perfect and not the last one we will make

Lauri Snellman suggests that the section of “Internal democracy” should come first and we should reconsider if we want to ask questions of chancing the OP already, first we should establish what the ground is

Philip notes that questions need to be extremely clear so that the responses are valid

Tick-boxes are better than open answer items for processing answers later

some questions are overlapping, e.g. satisfaction with the OP and satisfaction with the internal structure

questions about OP are critical; do ppl have enough knowledge

most of the transparency section was good, “hot topics”-expression bad, maybe trending or current topics better

review the probability of some suggestions, if sth seems improbable, maybe it does not need to be on the questionnaire

we should have one or two questions on the VC, not too many – remove pressure from the VC

when you use different scale in the questionnaire, you need to explain it

maybe the question “My DSC has an effective polling system” is not needed, since many DSCs might be so small that they do not vote on issues

Philip was in London and by the discussions there he was discouraged by taking further action, YV is not interested in democracy but economics, we should concentrate our efforts on the survey and find support for refocusing on democracy from there

Pedro: we as DiD should not comment whether DiEM should focus more on policy or democracy, at least not without referring to our survey results

Update of the Tooltesting WG: proposal for new voting tool(s) + proposal for collaboration tool

suggestion from Tooltesters: take up Loomio as voting platform, it can be used without being a Loomio-user (public), the only downside of Loomio is that it does not allow multiple-option vote but this is a common feature to all voting platforms, plus it does not have a mobile app

all members have now two weeks time to contribute to the proposal

in the next meeting we will vote on this

Tooltesters suggest a vote on Framapad is put forwards

Philipp had heard of represent.me -tool in London, it could be looked into in Tooltesters as it might be taken up in Diem later, so it would be good if DiD formed an informed opinion

Pedro: represent.me seems to be beyond our needs and more fitting for representative democracy than DiD

Meeting in Real life – an update and new perspectives

The CC-initiated meeting in Dublin in March will not happen

There will be a meeting by DSC Dublin in May/June which has a grassroots-orientation, main focus on World Café -type of discussions

Duration two days, on the first day World Café -type of Diem Ireland launch and on the second day could be the DiD meeting

This can be combined with a seminar organized by high profile Diemer, but the general focus will be on grassroots

Lauri: it is nice to see that the CC debates also the role of the famous diemers and how DSC members can participate in events, there is an opening

Suggestion: ask diders by Doodle when they are available to come to Ireland, are you ok to make this partly a DiD event?

A Spokesperson for DiEM25

Pedro: we need a person or people to connect diemers

Lauri: Spokesperson/-people sound too abstract, we should rather further the network-structure and get them institutionalized

Pedro: the way to establish network collectives is only when we get many ppl involved in the conversation, the spokesperson would be there to collect and connect those networks

1. spokesperson/ppl would be elected by the people

2. spokesperson/ppl would talk to a DSC at least once a month and channels their wishes forward

3. spokesperson/ppl would talk in the voice of DiEM25

4. spokesperson would talk to all the DSCs

This would be real coordination what is currently not happening

Philip: how should spokesperson go around the fact that there are tens of thousands of diemers and not the time to connect with each one of them – currently the CC members are really overworked

Wessel: we should start having a conversation (maybe as a working group) on the problems we are having with the organization before proposing solutions – is agreed upon

Discuss if votes can be transferred. How to legitimate the transfer?

Vote transfer would be useful for issues where one does not posses the necessary information to make an informed choice but would like to partake in democratic vote, transferring their vote to a more knowledgeable dider on that particular issue (see video on Liquid Democracy for reference: https://youtu.be/fg0_Vhldz-8?t=3m16s)

No final vote is made in the meeting, so there does not seem to be an issue how to legitimate a vote-transfer ahead of meeting (Wessel), however a process is started in a meeting (Pedro)